“A rare 1-cent coin from 1793 recently sold for $1.38 million. That sounds amazing until you realize it’s an annual return of less than 9%, or about the same as stocks have produced historically.” –Morgan Housel, Columnist at The Motley Fool (2012)

This shows the incredible power of compounding interest and a lot of time. After I read this, I started asking my friends a simple question: If you had $1,000,000 USD in 2013, but you had to trust it to your ancestors not to be used until 12013 (10,000 years in the future) How would you invest the money now?

My first answer was gold, as of writing this $1M would buy a little less than 56 pounds of gold. My reasoning was that gold has been used as a store of value for several thousand years, so I would bet it will be valuable for thousands of years into the future. My friends, who are smarter than me, gave answers that I really like: land and water. Their answers looked at the idea that freshwater may be scarce in the future.

Its an interesting question to ponder, normally we think of long term investments as 3-5 years. A 10,000 year investment is something that makes Warren Buffet look like a day trader. So if you had to guess what the future was going to be like, and put up some money, what would you invest in?